Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
L. E. L.
-
Standard Name: L. E. L.
Birth Name: Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Pseudonym: L.
Pseudonym: L. E. L.
Used Form: LEL
Used Form: L.E.L.
LEL was one of the most prolific and popular authors of her day. She produced an immense corpus of poetry, several works of fiction (the first a particularly striking silver fork novel), and considerable review and editorial work. Her work more than any other popularized the persona of the lovelorn, doomed poetess in the early nineteenth century.
In Nottingham MH
met L. E. L.
and perhaps Elizabeth Fry
. She was visited by Mary
and Dora Wordsworth
(wife and daughter of the poet), and later she and her husband stayed with the...
Friends, Associates
Anna Eliza Bray
Owing to her nervousness and delicate health AEB
did not socialize much; her literary friends were few though deeply valued, including L. E. L.
, John Murray
, Owen Rees
, and Anna Maria Hall
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
She now met the Chorley
family, Shelton Mackenzie
of the Dublin University Magazine, and other figures in Liverpool literary society. She presumably...
Friends, Associates
Catherine Gore
CG
was acquainted with a number of important literary figures. Before leaving London for the Continent she attended an assembly given by Rosina Bulwer-Lytton
to which Disraeli
, Lady Morgan
, and Letitia Landon
also...
Health
Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington
She was under considerable financial pressure as a result not only of her large entertainments but of dependent family members, pensioned servants, and others whom she aided, including the mother of L.E.L.
She wrote to...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Charlotte Bury
The title-page quotes some lines from Robert Burton
's Anatomy of Melancholy which begin, When I go musing all alone.
qtd. in
Bury, Lady Charlotte. "Alla Giornata"; or, To the Day. Saunders and Otley, 1826, 3 vols.
title-page
This is a novel of cosmpolitan culture, set in fifteenth-century Italy. The quotation...
In a critical preface HS
reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford
or Edward Bulwer Lytton
). The two groups of lovers and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Felicia Hemans
The volume takes its epigraphs and historical starting-points from a wide range of sources, including major male Romantics—Wordsworth
, Byron
, Coleridge
, Goethe
, Schiller
—and lesser-known contemporaries including women—Elizabeth Ogilvy Benger
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Elizabeth Moody
engagingly converts Sappho
into a contemporary in Sappho Burns her Books and Cultivates the Culinary Arts, 1798.
Jay, Peter, and Caroline Lewis. Sappho Through English Poetry. Anvil Press Poetry, 1996.
98
But many women poets accepted the notion of her rejected love for Phaon: Robinson
Intertextuality and Influence
Felicia Hemans
Some of the poems in Records of Woman have recently been embraced by certain scholars (including Isobel Armstrong
in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, who discusses them alongside poems by L. E. L.
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Catherine Hume
The starting-point for the poem is the tradition (subtly questioned) of Sappho's suicide as an abandoned woman; this fact links the text to other responses to the topic by other women poets including Felicia Hemans
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Byron
and Wordsworth
were important poetic influences. Books that Elizabeth Barrett owned and kept until her death included Philip James Bailey
's Festus, A Poem, a major text of the spasmodic school, L. E. L.
Intertextuality and Influence
Frances Trollope
FT
's years of literary success were marked by tragedy: she lost two of her children to consumption, and eventually lost a third.
Nadel, Ira Bruce, and William E. Fredeman, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 21. Gale Research, 1983.
21: 324
Heineman, Helen. Mrs. Trollope: The Triumphant Feminine in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio University Press, 1979.
135
However, her writing brought her into a supportive network...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
L. E. L.,. The Vow of the Peacock. Editor Sypher, Francis Jacques, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1997.
L. E. L.,. The Works of L.E. Landon. E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1838.
L. E. L., and Emma Roberts. The Zenana. Fisher, 1839.
L. E. L.,. Traits and Trials of Early Life. H. Colburn, 1836.
Hill, Isabel et al. “Translator’s Preface; Madame de Staël”. Corinne; or, Italy, translated by. Isabel Hill and L. E. L., A. L. Burt, 1857, p. iii - iv; v-xxi.
